From Frontman to Founder
Building a Financial System for Touring Musicians
Welcome to the BandMath development diary. I’m Tom. I’m a frontman, a solo developer, and maybe just a little too obsessed with band micro-finance. Putting my band Lynxhead together took a lot more process and organization than I thought a rock n’ roll project would but all along the way I found that the more organized we were, the more time we opened up to spend working on the music. So I always liked going the extra mile to make our process smoother.
Band Finance: the unsung hero of music productivity
Facilitating small transactions was a big part of that. The band constantly has little expenses and incomes that might be getting paid by/ to anyone at any time. It could be the monthly studio rental, a new mixing console, or a round of beers. In every one of these cases it’s much easier if one person can pay for it and then credit the others. So having a frictionless way to get things done (like my favorite thing: buying gear) is essential to getting your project going.
That’s what got me interested in the idea of custodian-style accounting and how I could sort of twist it and adapt it to the funny economics of a rock band. Custodian-style accounting is a pretty boring, typical concept in banking where the bank is basically able to mix all the money it receives into a big pot while at the same time keeping everyone’s shares separate. So my idea was, what if instead of one bank to hold everyone’s money, everyone was themselves a bank that could hold the money of any other member of the group, while effectively mixing it all together in your pocket. A sort of collective of banks.
Easier said than done
On a spreadsheet this can get really unwieldy. It basically requires a ledger for every combination of members where their individual fraction of each transaction gets counted. It’s a lot of columns. Too many really. In 2026 there’s no need for that many columns. If it was just for the expense sharing aspect of this whole thing a spreadsheet could have continued to be a functional solution but as soon as you get merch involved it’s not really practical for tracking the inventory plus the cost and retail prices and then working the profits back into the group standings.
And that’s how I started researching relational databases. Relational databases are like if your spreadsheet took LSD and all the columns could float off the grid to freely disassociate themselves and share their information wherever it might be called upon. I then saw a path towards building an app that could support the dual need of expense tracking plus inventory management while being not so complicated that I couldn’t manage the build on my own.
5 weeks ago I committed full time to this project thinking I would have it wrapped up in a week or 2 max. But in the first week something clicked in my brain and I realized this was my calling. That this project was an extension of myself that captured all of my passions, interests and skills in one place. I put a lot of myself into this project, partly because this thing is for me. I can’t wait to finish this project so I can put BandMath to work managing all the uncounted t-shirts sitting in our studio right now. But I’m also really excited to build something real and share it with other creators who are dealing with the same organizational challenges we have.
The horizon
Now I’ve come this far and it’s humbling to look out at the vista and realize, “wow, this is still just the beginning”. I’m loving the process of building something I care about from scratch and I can’t wait to share more of it as I press on.
I am not doing this the Silicon Valley way. No venture capital or equity funding this project. This is a 100% independent, bootstrapped operation.
That is exactly why I am launching this publication. I am building BandMath completely in public. If you subscribe here, you will get two things from me on a regular basis:
Touring Finance Playbooks: Hard-earned lessons on how to actually manage money on the road, from dodging terrible international exchange rates to handling merch inventory across borders.
The Solo Dev Diary: The raw, unfiltered reality of building a software company from scratch as an independent musician.
Right now, we are roughly a month away from launching our secure, multi-band architecture. To fund the final server costs and keep this project completely independent, I have opened up the Bootstrappers Club.
I am offering 100 Lifetime Passes for a one-time payment of €100. If you grab one, you get full, permanent access to the Tier 1 Merch POS and inventory tracker with zero monthly fees, ever.
If you want to see some actual demos of the product check out: itsbandmath.com.
Otherwise, drop your email below to subscribe to the journey. Let’s figure out the business of touring together.
Talk soon,
Tom Strike
Founder, BandMath